Chapter 23 – Regina
Chapter
Twenty-Three
REGINA
Sean’s brain is broken.
Not in the usual adorkable way, where he mixes his metaphors or mistakes toothpaste for his scar cream.
This is far more concerning.
He keeps opening his mouth. Jaw drops, lips part, tongue starts to form a word, and then nothing. Just closes his mouth again like a fish who thought about biting the hook and decided not to.
This has been going on for four days.
“What were you going to say?” I asked the first time it happened.
“Huh? Nothing.”
“You literally just opened your mouth.”
“I was yawning.”
“For a solid minute?”
“It’s a medical condition.”
The second time, he was mid-sentence about pizza toppings and suddenly froze, went silent, then pivoted into an extremely passionate defense of pineapple on pizza that felt designed to distract me from the fact that his face had gone purple as his brain short-circuited for about six seconds.
By the third day, I stopped asking and started watching.
Killian is worse, but in the opposite direction.
Where Sean is malfunctioning, Killian has gone full shutdown. He was already withdrawing before, sure, pulling away inch by inch, spending his time by windows and exits like he’s auditioning for a vampire melodrama. But I thought we’d made some progress after what happened on the rooftop.
Now there’s an edge to his silence. An anger that wasn’t there before, directed at something I can’t figure out. He’s been grinding his teeth so hard I can hear it from across the room, and he mutters in his sleep.
Yesterday, I walked into the kitchen and he had his hands flat on the counter, head bowed, fingers white against the marble. When I said his name, he jerked upright like I’d caught him in a trance.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
That’s always the answer. Fine.
He never means it any more than I did.
I brought it up to Micah and Rowan separately, because I’m not above a good old-fashioned strategy of divide and interrogate. Micah frowned, adjusted his glasses, and said he’d noticed Sean acting weird but figured it was just Sean.
Which is… fair. The man once spent an entire afternoon trying to teach Villeneuve’s koi fish to high five. There is a wide latitude for “weird” when it comes to Sean Brewer.
Rowan was more thoughtful about it. “Killian’s been tense,” he said, which qualified for understatement of the century. “But I don’t know why, other than the obvious reasons. He’s not talking to me. He’s not talking to anyone.”
“He’s talking to Sean,” I said.
Rowan’s eyebrows shot up. “How do you know?”
“Because I came downstairs two nights ago and they were in the courtyard arguing. As soon as I opened the door, they both shut up. Sean started whistling.”
“Sean can’t whistle.”
“I’m aware.”
And then there was the running.
Tuesday morning, I found Sean in the back garden in his wolf form, sprinting in circles.
He wasn’t even chasing anything. Just...
running in a wide loop around the fountain, tongue out, making these frustrated whining sounds.
When he saw me watching from the window, he stopped, sat down, and stared at me with his one good eye like he was willing me to understand something through sheer golden retriever intensity.
I opened the window. “You good?”
He let out a noise that was half bark, half anguished groan, and went back to running in circles.
The bond gives me no clues, except the distress I feel coming from them both. Whatever happened, it’s like they want to tell me, but they either can’t or won’t and it’s frustrating as hell either way.
Even Villeneuve is acting off.
He hasn’t spoken to me directly in two days outside of class, which isn’t unusual in itself, but the way he’s doing it is. He’s not avoiding me the way he was before, where I’d catch him watching and he’d look away.
Now he’s avoiding me like I’m a live grenade.
He leaves rooms when I enter them. Takes corners when he sees me coming down the hall. He even sent Margot to deliver a message that could have been a text.
“The Professor says dinner will be at seven,” she told me earlier in her wispy, unnerving way.
“He couldn’t walk twenty feet to tell me that himself?”
“The Professor is indisposed.”
“He’s in the next room. I can hear him turning pages.”
Margot’s expression didn’t change because Margot’s expression never changes. “Shall I relay a message?”
I told her to relay that he was being ridiculous, and she floated away without confirming or denying that she would.
So. Three alphas acting like they’ve collectively lost the plot, two who swear they don’t know why, and one otherworldly maid who may or may not be passing notes.
This is my life now.
When I come back to the mansion after class on Friday, Sean is waiting for me in the bedroom and holding a whiteboard.
A full-size whiteboard. It’s the kind you mount on a wall, and I’m almost certain he stole it from a classroom because it has a university logo sticker on the bottom left corner.
He’s got it positioned in front of the bed and he’s clutching a set of dry-erase markers between his fingers like Wolverine’s claws.
“Did you steal that?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He grabs my arm with his free hand and pulls me into the bedroom. “Come on, I need you.”
Under literally any other circumstances, that sentence would have a very different implication. Sean has a bit of a one-track mind. Right now, he looks like a man on a mission, and the mission appears to involve office supplies.
He kicks the bedroom door shut behind us and uncaps the blue marker with his teeth.
“We’re playing charades,” he announces.
I stare at him. “Charades.”
“Yes.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a game beloved by millions.”
It’s the least convincing lie he’s ever told, and this is a man who recently told a professor the flames on his eyepatch were medically necessary.
But the look on his face is desperate enough that it makes me pause, like he’s searching for something he can’t articulate. I know that look. I’ve been seeing it all week.
“Okay,” I say with a shrug. “Let’s play charades.”
He starts furiously drawing on the whiteboard, brow furrowed, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. After about thirty seconds of vigorous scribbling, he turns the board around.
It’s... a circle.
With lines coming off it.
And what might be a squiggle next to what might be a lightning bolt, unless it’s a snake. Or a river. There’s a stick figure underneath doing something that could be waving, drowning, or performing jazz hands.
“Is that a sun?” I guess.
He shakes his head violently.
“A... spider?”
More head-shaking. He points at the squiggle, then at himself, then at me, then back at the squiggle with increasing urgency.
“Sean, I genuinely have no idea what I’m looking at.”
He wipes the board, tries again. This time the drawing involves what appears to be two figures, a building with a triangular roof, and a series of wavy lines connecting everything. He’s also drawn what looks like a padlock, or maybe a purse.
“A house with a fence?”
He groans and grabs the red marker, adding aggressive arrows pointing at the wavy lines. Then he draws a mouth, crosses it out with a big X, and points at himself.
“You can’t eat the wavy lines?”
“No!” He catches himself, frustrated. He tries again, opening his mouth to explain, and I watch his jaw work, watch the words form and then dissolve. His hands curl into fists at his sides. “I just... FUCK!”
I cross my arms, studying the whiteboard. Two figures connected by wavy lines. A crossed-out mouth. A padlock. A building.
And then he draws one more thing, a third figure that’s taller than the other two, with what appears to be wings coming off its back. Or a cape. Or possibly just really aggressive shoulder pads.
I take a wild guess, because when it comes to Sean, that’s the highest chance of success. “Is that Villeneuve?”
Sean’s eye goes wide. He nods so hard his eyepatch shifts.
I look at the drawing again. Villeneuve, connected by wavy lines to... me? And a crossed-out mouth, and a padlock.
Sean is watching me with the desperation of a dog who can see the treat in your hand but can’t figure out how to perform the specific trick you want him to do.
I open my mouth to ask a follow-up question, but then I look at the bottom corner of the whiteboard where he’s added what appears to be a crudely drawn penis.
I lose my train of thought.
“Is that a dick? Is that what this is about? You want a blowjob?”
Sean freezes. His mouth opens, then shuts, and his entire face cycles through about thirty different expressions in two seconds. His face settles on a curious combination of defeat and hopelessness. “I mean... well. Yeah. Always.”
Despite everything, I laugh. “You’ve been so weird this week. You know that, right? The running in circles, the mouth thing, the arguing with Killian in the courtyard at midnight…”
He drops the marker. Some of the frantic energy bleeds out of his shoulders. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just... Fuck. This is hard to...” He trails off and clearly tries to finish the sentence, but he can’t.
“The stress is getting to all of you,” I say, because it is.
The virus spreading through Killian, Knox breathing down our necks, Kyle still being missing, the necromancer still hiding out there somewhere. It’s a lot. Even for a pack of wolves whose entire existence could be summed up as a lot.
And then there’s Sean’s injury…
He seems to be taking it all in stride, but that’s the thing about Sean.
He’s always there for everyone else, always throwing himself under the bus to make the rest of us laugh.
I’m pretty sure if he was having a hard time, he wouldn’t say anything.
He probably wouldn’t even notice, because he doesn’t think of himself like that.
“You don’t have to go to these ridiculous lengths to tell me you need some quality time,” I tell him.
He groans and drops his head. “I’ve got a ridiculous length to show you.”